How is the legal situation for edited maps?

Question

I am currently working on a commercial GIS project and have a lot of uncertainties regarding legal situations and terms of use for different maps.

For example, the data of eurostat does not allow a commercial use of this data. But looking at the following dataset by the European Environment Agency, you can see, that they used the eurosat data as template. According to their terms of use, the data is also free for commercial use.

Now I am asking myself whether I could also use some datasets, which are not free for commercial use, redraw them in GIS for myself based on the template and then work with them without violating any legal rights?

Answer 1

Generally when an organisation says that their data may not be used commercially they really mean that it cannot be used commercially without payment for some type of licence. ESA will probably have bought a licence from eurostat that allows them to publish and make available product CONSTRUCTED FROM the eurostat data BUT NOT CONTAINING ALL THE ORIGINAL OWNERS DATA IN ITS ORIGINAL FORMAT. When ESA make their product available you will probably find you are not getting access to all the original eurostat data in its original format.

It may be that ESA out of commercial kindness ARE making the original eurostat data available for free but it seems unlikely.

If you are trying to find ways of circumventing somebodies data licensing then what you are doing is likely to be illegal.